For current students

The Space of Sensory Modalities

Wed 31st October 2012 16:15

Room 104, Edgecliffe

Fiona MacPherson (Glasgow)

In this paper, I explore, refine, and defend the idea that we can construct a space of the sensory modalities – an idea that I briefly proposed in earlier work . Such a space would be one in which we can represent all the actual, and at least some of the possible, sensory modalities. The relative position of the senses in this space would indicate how similar and how different the senses were from each other. In particular, I defend the idea from three objections that Richard Gray has recently put forth. I also claim that the construction of such a space may help us to define what a sense is, provide grounds that we might use to decide what is one token sense rather than multiple token senses, and reveal unconsidered features of the actual and possible senses.